Sometimes Venison thought about Daisy. Suppose Daisy had not gone away? Then she would not have had the money, and the long, quiet excitement of living a life that was really her own. Had Daisy gone away for her sake, because she had suddenly felt that she, Venison, was entitled to a life that was really all her own? No, she decided, Daisy had gone away because she had suddenly felt that she, Daisy, was entitled to a life that was really all her own. How alike she and Daisy were —except that she would never have gone away first or left the money behind. Venison smiled to herself good-naturedly whenever she thought of Daisy—as a dog wags his tail good- naturedly at a cat that he has chased up a tree, and then turns to finish her supper with friendly relish, not at all upset by the obscure way in which she watches him.
THREE TIMES ROUND
LOTUS was a girl with two distinct sides to her nature, and this showed in her looks. When a girl resembles both her mother and her father it usually happens that she makes a disturbing impression on people; just as it is disturbing when there is moonlight and sunlight at the same time. Lotus had her father's long thin nose and small, tight mouth. But her eyes were her mother's, and the shape of her body was her mother's. She seemed a pleasant-looking girl to people when they first met her, but when they got to know her they thought her looks rather sinister. And it was the same with her character as with her appearance. Yet Lotus did not mean to seem sinister. She did not mean to be different from ordinary people. But she liked having adventures all by herself, which gave her a secretive manner, since she said nothing about them.
A man called Sam was in love with Lotus. Sam was a sensible sort of person. "If only she had an adventure that would have some effect on her," he would say to her mother, "she'd stop behaving like an Unseen Presence." "Yes," her mother would agree, "she's exactly as her father was, always wrapped up in herself, but expecting everyone to be nice to her, and surprised when they're not." Lotus's adventures had no effect on her because her part in them consisted merely in watching what was done and listening to what was said. She did not take them seriously enough to be affected by them. She did not take anything very seriously. This was why she liked having adventures all by herself, with no one about who knew her to think that she was not showing sufficient interest. It made her unhappy when people thought her rude or egotistical or secretive, when actually she was only being careful not to pretend. It seemed strange to her that a sensible person like Sam, of whom she was really fond, did not understand that she too was a sensible person in her way. Her way could not be a man's way. When men were sensible they busied themselves seriously about a few things that were not in themselves serious. Sensible women merely left everything as it was. Men always had to exaggerate the importance of things, no matter how sensible they were, if it were only playing golf or being in business or having certain opinions.
But Sam said that he would not marry her until he had seen her shed tears. Her mother thought that it might be a good idea to send her round the world. So Lotus started on a trip round the world. In Paris she met a woman called Grace who took a positive interest in other people's lives and made money by acting as intermediary between people who were in a disadvantageous position and those who had some advantage over them. She knew how to take both sides and make the side that had the upper hand even more grateful to her than the other. When Lotus met her she was about to set out on a mission to a German university town for someone who wanted a certificate in anatomy that he was not entitled to from a professor with whom he had boarded and to whom he owed a lot of money. The professor also had against him the seduction of his daughter Louise, a professional masseuse, whom the student had promised to take with him to Paris. They were to open a body-culture school together in his uncle's hotel. The young man had seduced the daughter, who was a good deal older than himself, because, from a business point of view, it was important that she should feel young. Being in business with a woman older than oneself often led to complications unless she felt that the relation was not purely a business one. But his uncle had quarrelled with his mother, who ran a beauty-salon in the hotel, because he had found that for some time she had been cheating him: he was supposed to receive a certain percentage of her profits in return for charging her no rent, and she had been concealing the full amount of her profits from him. Maurice, the young man, had taken his mother's side, since she had a better business-head, for his purposes, than his uncle. And so he had suddenly left the university, telling Louise that he would send for her later. He and his mother opened a body-culture school together, but he had not sent for Louise: a man could not be in business with two women. His mother now wanted Maurice to have a certificate in anatomy that she could frame and hang in the waiting-room. He was still a year short of his Physikum when his mother called him to her, but Grace was sure that she could get some sort of certificate for him—anything in German would do.
The professor ran a pension with his daughter, and Grace and Lotus went there to stay. They made friends with Louise, and she told them in confidence about Maurice. Grace told her that she knew Maurice, letting it seem a coincidence. She made Louise feel sorry for him by describing how tyrannical his mother was and how he had struggled with her over Louise, having finally to give her up. This pleased Louise; Grace made her feel that she had really had a love-affair. Grace also explained about the certificate, how his mother, though the cause of his having left so suddenly, treated him without respect. A certificate to hang in the waiting-room would have made all the difference, but of course Maurice was too miserable about Louise and his unpaid bill to write to the professor and ask for one. Louise formed a conspiracy with Grace to get a certificate of some sort from her father. Grace was to pretend that she was a secret emissary from Maurice to Louise, and Louise would pretend that she and Maurice had been in secret correspondence with each other ever since he had left.
Under the impression that Maurice had been working hard all that time in order to be, one day, a self-supporting son-in- law, the professor went to a notary and signed a large testimonial on parchment. Before going off with the certificate, Grace had a long private talk with the professor in which she, though apparently the trusted friend of both Maurice and his mother, strongly advised against the marriage, in his and Louise's interest. The professor was so affected by her frankness that he gave her a very pretty jacinth, worth about five hundred marks, out of his collection of gems, largely gifts from Eastern students who had lodged with him and been unable to pay their bills.
Grace left on good terms with everyone. Lotus planned to meet her in a month in Cairo, where Maurice's uncle would then be taking a holiday and where she hoped to be able to produce in him a kindlier attitude towards his nephew and his sister-in-law. Grace also had a sister in Cairo who was married to a Belgian business-man from whom she had run away several times, but to whom she was always forced to return because, since one of her eyes was a glass eye, no one stayed in love with her very long—though apart from this she was an exceptionally beautiful woman.
Lotus stayed on with Louise. Louise told her about the different kinds of deformities that she had worked on in a Viennese clinic before her mother had died and she had had to come home to look after her father. Louise also told her about the eccentricities of some of the students. In the basement of the pension a secret society met one night every week, and very peculiar things went on, to which her father did not object, however, because they were done in a scientific spirit. A Norwegian, who was known as a fighter whom nobody had ever been able to knock down, would let himself be knocked down by each of the members in turn. A Japanese, who was known as a morbidly shy, devious character, would take off all his clothes and get himself so entangled in dozens of yards of tape that the other members would have to help him disentangle himself. Lotus met him once at a tea at the pension. He did not seem to be so shy with women as with men. He told her how serpent-soup was made in Japan. "The serpents are immured in water that is to boil and the pot is covered with a lid fo
r making them put their heads through little holes when the water boils. So we slice off their heads and the soup is edible." He wanted to draw her a picture of it, and she looked in her purse for a pencil but could not find one. "No," he said politely, "the only pencil you would possess would be a lip-pencil." When Lotus said that this was a very rude way to speak, he replied sadly, "You must forgive me, I am only learning everything." Lotus decided that after Cairo she would go to Japan, and wrote to her mother to say that this was what she would do. The Japanese attracted her as people who did not take things very heartily.
In Cairo Grace had succeeded in bringing about a reconciliation between Maurice and his uncle. She had accounted for his mother's fraud by explaining that Maurice had got himself into trouble with the daughter of a professor, and that he had not wanted his uncle to know about it, and that his mother had had to send him money. The uncle was touched by the mother's loyalty, by Maurice's having hidden his trouble from him, by Grace's disinterested appreciation of the difficulties of all three. He was sorry that he had been so severe and sent a handsome cheque to Maurice. He hoped that Grace would stop at his hotel as his personal guest whenever she was in Paris. Lotus enjoyed listening to Grace's experiences as she enjoyed sitting in hotel lounges watching people come and go and overhearing conversations. In Cairo Lotus and Grace and Grace's sister went on excursions together in a car driven by a chauffeur called Michael. Michael said his father was a Greek nobleman and his mother a rich American. His mother had divorced her husband, paying him a generous yearly income and keeping her title. She had disinherited Michael because he did things which disgraced the family name. She was very proud of the family name, prouder of it than his father, who also did things which disgraced it. She lived at Belgrade in a large house and entertained foreign newspaper correspondents and people from different embassies, and was said to be a force to be reckoned with in Balkan politics. Michael was an entertaining talker. He knew all the waiters in Cairo and could gossip competently about the people who spent their winters there—half-rich people disappointed with themselves for not being greater celebrities than they were, and who had a petulant, jealous attitude to the other members of their class whom they met there.
Their friendship with Michael ended in a motor accident caused by a handless beggar who jumped on the running- board and waved his inflamed stumps in their faces. Grace's sister, who was sensitive about such things, screamed, and Michael looked round, and the car ran into another car, killing one of the occupants, who were Egyptians. Michael and Grace and Grace's sister somehow made Lotus feel that she was the rich one among them, and so she took upon herself the responsibility of settling with the victim's relatives. This used up so much of her money that she gave up the idea of going to Japan. She could get home more cheaply by going back the same way that she had come. She did not, however, want to explain to her mother why she was not going to Japan; it always embarrassed her to discuss herself or her doings in detail. She stayed on in Cairo for a while, hoping that her mother would assume that she was on her way to Japan. Her mother would not think it strange that she did not write. She always thought it rather strange in fact that Lotus wrote to her at all; she did not understand that Lotus wrote only because she did not want to seem unkind, and that she did not write often because, no matter how little she wrote, whatever she wrote seemed like a lie.
Lotus arrived home suddenly, without having let her mother know beforehand. When she heard her mother tell people that she had been to Japan, she did not contradict her. In Cairo Lotus had met a missionary on her way back from China with a trunkful of oriental Christmas gifts to sell to her friends, and had bought from her a string of grotesquely large Chinese crystals. Lotus's mother accepted these as a proof that Lotus had been to Japan. Lotus had meant them to be a gift for her mother; but her mother said, "Oh, I could not wear anything so mysterious-looking, they're much more suitable for you." Lotus took them back and wore them occasionally, although she could not see why, if they were mysterious-looking, they were more suitable for her than for her mother. She was not conscious of making a mystery of herself. Her mother's character puzzled her much more than her own; she seemed to worry so much about her and yet not to love her, as if there were some secret reason why she could not. Perhaps, Lotus thought, she should never have had a child. Perhaps she herself should never have been. Certainly she did not feel at ease in the world. But did anyone?
Lotus's mother and Sam noticed very little change in Lotus, beyond her seeming less sensitive to what people thought of her. It was true, indeed, that travelling always had this effect on people. "I don't like to talk like this about Lotus," her mother said to Sam. "A mother should have some illusions about her daughter, otherwise it's difficult to play the mother in an emergency. But do you know, Sam, I think she's capable of doing something really wicked. It's a short step from indifference to immorality." Sam by this time had given up hope of Lotus's ever softening and was thinking of marrying a girl whom he knew to be in love with him. He was not in love with her; this would make it easier for him to divorce her if Lotus should, one day, undergo a miraculous change. "The important thing nowadays," he said to Lotus's mother, "is to keep sane. It used to be an asset to be a little insane, just as everybody used to respect geniuses. But now that everyone knows the causes of insanity it makes one look foolish." Lotus's mother almost wished that her daughter would have something happen to her to spoil her appearance. Some people could only be affected through their vanity; none of the things, like time, that helped to mould the character of ordinary people seemed to affect Lotus.
When, during the next few years, it became clear that Lotus was developing a goitre, her mother began to wonder whether it was not dangerous to think about a person as much as she and Sam had thought about Lotus. And so, as soon as the goitre was operated on and Lotus was well enough to travel, her mother sent her on a second trip round the world. This time Lotus went straight to Vienna. Louise's stories about the cases that she had treated in Vienna made it seemed a city of cases; the ugly scar on her throat made her feel, as she had never felt before, that she herself was a case. She had never before considered herself the kind of person to whom things happened. Perhaps she did not understand herself—or the world. Yet there did not seem to be much to understand; it did not seem that much happened. Or, at any rate, whatever happened was all over so soon.
In Vienna she took a room with a Frau Ritter, who did detective work for the police against small shops that evaded city regulations. Frau Ritter was very tall and very fat—a gloomy combination in a person from whom one naturally expected amusement as a foreign landlady. Her extreme tallness and fatness made her seem more like a murderess than a foreign landlady. Her accounts of the tricks that she caught shopkeepers in were not only boring to Lotus but also vexed her strangely. She would have liked to be able to feel sorry for people. For instance, there was the drunken old woman who had behaved in a dirty way in a tram-car. The conductor had put her off, and no one had been even interested enough to grin. Why had no one been interested in the old woman? Why had the old woman not been interested in herself? She had got off in a daze and waited for the next tram-car. Lotus herself had not been really interested in the old woman, but troubled by her lack of interest. The fact that she did not take things seriously now seemed to her tragic; the world seemed a tragic world because there was nothing in it that she could take seriously—nothing that took hold. The way she dressed now gave the impression that she was a person who had seen tragedy, though not been touched by it herself. She had to wear grotesquely large necklaces to hide her scar—she was pleased now to have the Chinese crystals—and grotesquely patterned tunics to go with the necklaces.
Also living in Frau Ritter's flat was a poor Hungarian chemist who worked in a patent-medicine factory. He slept on a sofa in the dining-room and had to get up early to free the room for breakfast. He was allowed to keep his books in the china-cupboard because this gave a tone of respectability to the
flat. The police were always suspicious of anyone who took in lodgers in Vienna. Frau Ritter had had to ask the young Czecho-Slovakian couple who occupied her most expensive room to have their meals in their own room: they were not married. Yet they were quite, polite people, of a higher social class than Frau Ritter and most of her other guests. It was not clear exactly what relations existed between Frau Ritter and the Hungarian. He spent much time in her room, but it was known that he was trying to cure her of warts on the head, under the hair, that had once been cut away by a doctor but had grown again. The Hungarian's relations with Frau Ritter did not, however, prevent him from attaching himself to Lotus in a comradely way. With Frau Ritter he was always gay and servile, but often when he was with Lotus he wept over himself proudly. "You remind me that my life is a failure, a tragic failure," he would say. "It is something to be able to feel at least that." He had not meant to be a chemist; but his father had been a village doctor and as a boy he had helped him make up medicines. His father had wanted him to be a doctor. He had chosen to be only a chemist: a chemist could be more scientific than a doctor. His real interest was not chemistry but Magyar origins; most of the books in the china-cupboard were on Magyar origins. But doctors—at least some—made money, and chemists did not. If he had money he would go to Tibet; the keys to many racial mysteries were hidden there, in monastery manuscripts. There was one monastery where the monks gave learned visitors a drug in their food that made their minds work so slowly that they sometimes spent years deciphering a dozen pages or so.
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